Where Normal Need Not Apply
Yes, I’m still under deadline, but an interesting issue came up in the comments on my last post about perfectionism. Perfectionists tend to be nitpicky, no surprise there. But there’s a time when that trait is very helpful, and a time when we need to ignore the compulsion to tweak. […]
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Yes, I’m still in the deadline cave this week, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yay! While I’m hiding, I wanted to share this post I originally wrote last summer. The lesson is even more relevant to me right now. (That’s a look at one […]
I’m still in the deadline cave and self-banned from Twitter, but I wanted to post about something I’ve realized through this revision process. It’s probably safe to say we all want to get better at our jobs, whether that’s writing or something else. But how much of what we do […]
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Opinionated statement alert: Every writer should volunteer to judge a writing contest. And not simply for altruistic reasons. No, we should do it because we can learn from reading others’ work, as it’s much easier to see mistakes in prose other than our own. My friend Anassa Rhenisch had […]
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Lately I’ve been struck by how similar music is to writing. Both arts use a non-visual medium to create an emotion. And often, just like writing, music is meant to create movies in our mind for a do-it-yourself music video. If you’ve ever watched a movie with the sound turned […]
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We’ve learned that head-hopping should be avoided if we want to maintain a strong connection between the reader and the characters, and we’ve learned that just calling something omniscient doesn’t solve the head-hopping problem. This brings up the obvious question: How do we avoid head-hopping? The answer might be different […]
Last time, we talked about how head-hopping is something to avoid, and not just because there’s a rule against it. Any change in point-of-view (POV), whether using an “allowed” technique or not, risks weakening the connection between the reader and the story. Head-hopping authors sometimes say they’re writing in omniscient […]
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Depending on who you talk to, head-hopping is somewhere between a shoulder shrug and the-world-is-ending bad. Note that neither of those extremes thinks that head-hopping is good. I suppose it could be positive if used in some sci-fi story, along the lines of “body snatchers,” but we’re talking about it […]
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If we don’t want to waste time writing a story that will never get anywhere, we have to make sure we’ll be able to complete it. And guess what? It’s not completed when we, as writers, think it is. Going from seed idea to completion happens over two stages. So […]
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Writers are often overwhelmed with story ideas. When I’m in the middle of difficult revisions, it’s normal for me to think of several other shiny ideas that I would much rather work on instead of doing yet another round of edits. But not every idea is worthy of a story, […]
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